Experimental demonstration of an ultra-low latency control plane for optical packet switching in data center networks

Optical interconnection networks have the potential to reduce latency and power consumption while increasing the bisection bandwidth of data center networks compared to electrical network architectures. Optical circuit-switched networking has been proposed but it is reconfigurable in milliseconds. Although switches operating on nanosecond timescales have been demonstrated, centrally scheduling such switching architectures is considered to be of high complexity, incurring significant delay penalties on the total switching latency. In this paper we present a high-speed control plane design based on a central switch scheduler for nanosecond optical switching which significantly reduces the end-to-end latency in the network compared to using the best electronic switches. We discuss the implementation of our control plane on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) boards and quantify its delay components. We focus on the output-port allocation circuit design which limits the scheduling delay and the end-to-end latency. Using our FPGA-implemented control plane, for a 32 x 32 switch, we experimentally demonstrate rack-scale optical packet switching with a minimum end-to-end head-to-tail latency of 71.0 ns, outperforming current state-of-the-art electronic switches. The effect of asynchronous control plane operation on the switch performance is evaluated experimentally. Finally, a new parallel allocation circuit design is presented decreasing the scheduling delay by 42.7% and the minimum end-to-end latency to 54.6 ns. More importantly, it enables scaling to a switch double the size (64 x 64) with a minimum end-to-end latency less than 71.0 ns. In a developed cycle-accurate network emulator we demonstrate nanosecond switching up to 60% of port capacity and average end-to-end latency less than 10 mu s at full capacity while maintaining zero packet loss across all traffic loads.